Piper and I were having a particularly good time trading funny faces with a super cute two-year-old in a Mexican restaurant in the East Village. We were riding what was up to that point the perfect buzz available to two people with dual incomes, decent rent, and no need to be home by 10 p.m. to pay a babysitter, when she looked at me and asked: "You're not going to turn 42, freak out, and leave me for some 27-year-old eager to be a mom, are you?"

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You can blame the Internet, Starbucks, bin Laden, or your neighbor's barking beagle, but we're a nation of tossers and turners. Our battle with shut-eye goes all the way back to the turn of the 20th century, when Thomas Edison began to mass-manufacture an inexpensive carbon light bulb, and families could keep their homes lit longer, for cheaper. "Edison thought people used darkness as an excuse to be lazy and unproductive," says Dr. Stanley Coren, a sleep expert and psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "Since then, as a society we have been constantly sleep deprived." In 1913, the average person enjoyed a whopping, wonderful nine and a half hours of sleep -- the ideal, according to Coren. Now most of us get seven and a half, tops.

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The second time I experienced In Loco Bongus I thought: This is getting weird (and also: What am I going to do with two bongs?). This time my co-worker walked into my office, closed the door, and sheepishly explained that while he and his glass two-footer had had some great times together, his son was getting older, he had a second on the way, and he didn't want anyone under 4 feet to stumble across it accidentally. "I don't want my boy to think it's OK to be a pothead," he explained. "Well, that's not true, I don't want him to think it's OK to be a full-blown hazed-out pothead." Which is why he switched to a much smaller, more easily stashed pipe.

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What comes to mind?

Getting high in your dorm room after finals? John Belushi in a hotel room, slumped over from a deadly mix of coke and heroin? A drive-by in South Central Los Angeles? A messy group hug at a warehouse rave? Medical marijuana? Mandatory minimums?

In "Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000," Martin Torgoff argues that the story of drugs in America is all these images and ideas -- and much, much more. Mixing oral history, autobiography and a large dose of firsthand sources from High Times to Foreign Policy, the book moves across time and culture, starring one drug after another, from marijuana to MDMA.

Torgoff, 51, a New York journalist and biographer of Elvis and John Cougar Mellencamp, refers to his own drug use and abuse throughout the book. Now married with a baby, Torgoff started smoking pot at 16 in 1968 -- the night Nixon was elected president. "I remember because as I was getting stoned, I heard the election returns coming down through the ceiling," he says. "That was the beginning of my run." It was a run that would take him from pot to psychedelics to coke and alcohol -- and finally into recovery at 37, in 1989.

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In a brilliant mix of editorial and marketing savvy, the task of finding out was put to Hanauer's husband, writer Daniel Jones. The result is "The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom."

"Bastard" tries to break down and make at least a little sense of a new moment in men's lives, a moment that Kevin Canty aptly describes in his unflinching essay, "The Dog in Me," as one where "something's come loose, something's come unglued ... we no longer feel quite comfortable in our roles, no longer quite fit the people we imagine ourselves to be." "Bastard" explores a time of feminism and equality, a bright new democratic future ... in which Canty and so many of us are wondering why we still seem to be paying for everything.

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I had seen a few women in various states of undress among the library stacks in college, but never expected this question in the children's section of a Barnes & Noble in the Upper West Side of New York City. I've known Amy, a 40-year-old children's television producer, all my life: she's as close to a surrogate sister as it gets. Still -- or, perhaps, because of this -- it was a little strange for both of us when she undid her blouse. For starters, it was Amy's first foray into public nursing: her daughter Emily was just a few weeks old. The fact that my fiancée was there too only added to the oddness. (Young Emily, however, was unfazed.) I pretended to flip through Lemony Snicket's latest dark tale, but Amy's the type to see an elephant in a room and invite it over for dinner and drinks. "You know, this is really weird," she said, "but I have to say, you're being amazingly cool."

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A magazine publicist couldn't have scripted it any better -- Cargo, now on newsstands, wasn't even out at the time -- but to me, it was completely embarrassing.

A self-described "comprehensive buyers' guide for men covering everything from clothes and tech to cars and culture to grooming and gifts," Cargo is the first in a new crop of men's magazines aiming to be the XY answer to Lucky, the wildly successful women's magazine unapologetically devoted to shopping. Call it Lucky Bastard.

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Introduced in 1996, OxyContin was initially marketed as a less addictive drug than other prescription narcotics because of its breakthrough formulation: a slowed-down time release, that supposedly thwarted those looking for a quick jolt. "At its birth," writes Meier, "OxyContin had been a pharmaceutical industry dream, a 'wonder' that heralded a sea change in the treatment of pain." But abusers discovered that by crushing and snorting the drug, they got a high that came on quicker and was more intense than with previously abused prescription drugs, such as Percocet. Initially popular in rural areas, OxyContin was dubbed "hillbilly heroin" and became one of the most highly abused street medications in history, particularly among teenagers looking for a quick and mellow high, one that could be pulled right out of their parents' medicine chests.

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MDMA itself has been on a wild ride, as illustrated by a timeline that details milestones in MDMA research. (It appears in the appendix of Dr. Julie Holland's "Ecstasy: A Complete Guide.") In 1953, for example, the U.S. Army Chemical Center gave MDMA to lab animals at the University of Michigan (an idea soon abandoned). Then there's Sept. 8, 1976, the day Shulgin took MDMA for the first time (16 milligrams, with no effect). There's MDMA's Schedule 1 status in 1985, and the government's $54 million effort in 1999 to educate the public about "club drugs." But since Holland's book was published, there have been two MDMA tipping points that aren't included in that timeline. They're huge.

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It's 1988, I'm 18 years old, a sophomore in college in Philadelphia, and I've just got my hands on two hits of something called Ecstasy. I got it from a friend, who got it from his friend, who got it from his girlfriend. She worked in a psych lab and had grabbed a bunch of government-issued, vitamin-C-coated, grade-A MDMA. Or so we were told.

I had first heard about Ecstasy a few years earlier in high school, back when it was still legal, back before the government classified it as a Schedule 1 narcotic, a class of drugs with maximum potential for abuse and no sanctioned medical use. I remember reading about young professionals in Philadelphia gushing about this new drug. Happiness in a pill. This was before there was much talk about Prozac. Or scary studies about MDMA-munching monkeys developing Parkinson's.

I have always had an affection for altered states. My mom tells a story of how I used to love trips to the dentist as a 6-year-old because the dentist let me go on an airplane ride (helloooooo.... nitrous!). In high school there was no greater joy than parking with my pals at what we called Rasta Road, smoking bowls, and playing Gene Loves Jezebel over and over and over. When a plate of mushrooms walked by in college, I waved it on over. Ecstasy was inevitable.

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We had been in the Petco for hours. Many hours. Enough hours that people began assuming my girlfriend and I were volunteers at KittyKind, the no-kill cat shelter that sets up camp in the massive pet store found on the northwest corner of New York City's Union Square. But we weren't volunteers -- we were just another decent, underemployed American couple trying to create a life together in a cramped apartment in the Lower East Side. And while we generally enjoyed that life, we knew it wouldn't be complete without the pitter-pat of little feet in our hall and on our heads in the middle of the night, fur all over our chic black wardrobe, and a litter box stashed in the shower.

I've been a cat owner for almost three decades. But as I walked into the Petco I realized that I've never actually gone shopping for one. My sister -- defying the no-pets clause my father put in our parents' marriage contract -- secured my family's first cat for a dollar at a school fair when she was in first grade. Pee Wee was a tough little dude until a mysterious fertilizer incident did him in. Next up: Daiquiri, a fancy indoor cat who arrived one happy afternoon, only to meet his demise in a freak flea bath accident shortly thereafter. A quiet period ended a few years later when I moved into an apartment in San Francisco where Woody was squatting. He was sweet and just a little crazy, so I kept him moving around with me for 12 years. I thought I had a pretty good handle on the cat world. Entering the matrix of KittyKind, it was apparent I did not. These people were different.

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With a full horn section and keyboards, the Hypnosonics was a larger outfit than the three-piece Morphine but, in keeping with Sandman's signature style, there still wasn't a guitar in the house. Not even a bass with a full set of strings.

By the third or fourth song, Sandman was clearly in his element, looking very much the part of a Tom Waits nighthawk-cum-Chris Isaak crooner and sounding like the sexiest man in all of New England. That's when my girlfriend whispered in my ear, "If you were a rock star, I think you'd be like him." For a woman not easily impressed by fame or fortune or rock stars or me or really much of anything, this was the nicest thing she could have said to me. It was a fantastic concert and an unforgettable evening, lit by the cool, smoky charge of Seqor Sandman.

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Make no mistake: Boston is doing just fine without me -- and without you, for that matter. Although just down the road at Plymouth, the Pilgrims set up shop, this is nonetheless a city in no hurry to take in the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Sure, once you scrape away that snowy New England surface, there is a certain love to be had within the Bostonian's frost-bitten soul, but these people take a long time to warm to anyone not sired within the city's elitist red-brick walls.

Maybe it's the hordes of students -- those rat bastards who under the guise of higher learning descend upon this town every fall, traveling in groups of 15, rendering stupefying lines at every ATM machine, making parking a car an even more horrifying experience and getting in the way of everything -- who have put Bostonians in such a foul mood. Perhaps it's the fact that the transition between scorching-hot summer and bone-chilling winter lasts about three days (it's a wonderful 72 hours, though). Or maybe no one's over The Curse, the fate of a city that traded Babe Ruth, ensuring that the Red Sox would never again win a World Series and that all Bostonians would forever remain bitter, spiteful codgers.

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Of course, the corporatization of the alternative isn't anything new, nor is it exactly the end of the world. But the latest trend in alternative publishing takes the whole process one step beyond anything you might have imagined a few short years ago. Now, big corporations aren't just trading off of alterna-chic -- they're growing their own alternative culture, with help from friendly natives.

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My friend Nicole was another Vogue fashion victim. Nicole's what you call "low maintenance," so I was a little surprised to see her, dressed casually in a blue sweatshirt (Champion) and ripped jeans (Gap), with the Vogue on her person. She caught my wandering eye, and, before I could comment, explained: "Look, I never buy the magazine, but you gotta buy the fall issue. You just gotta." Before we took the conversation further, her eyes fluttered and rolled and she collapsed in my arms. She had fainted, wiped out from carrying Vogue around all morning.

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